Music > Live Reviews
The Fratellis
The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA
28/11/16
So what is it with all these bands touring classic albums in their entirety? Let's be honest here. Even some of the biggest albums of all time can contain a duff track or a little bit of filler. The perfect gig, however, is a skilfully curated combination of both new material and monster hits, a well-paced mixture of tempos and moods taking us on a roller-coaster ride that ends with a climactic encore and us exiting the venue grinning like Cheshire cats.
So, perhaps the answer to the appeal lies in a gradual but long overdue questioning of our own playlist lifestyles. For too long we have survived on a diet of YouTube videos and Spotify feeds. Picking at a feast yet never finishing an entire dish. We dine out on highly-compressed digital downloads, and forget what real hi-fidelity music tastes like. Hence the reactionary, and yet still questionable, love affair with vinyl. It is a re-discovery of the pleasure to be gained from listening to an entire recording. Not a greatest hits collection, or a NOW compilation. A proper album. Every track. In original running order.
Whatever the reasons or the motives, it seems to have worked. Together with 1500 others, I am at the Nick Rayns LCR on a Sunday night for a sold out show by Glaswegian indie-rockers The Fratellis. Maybe not because we fell in love with their two most recent albums, We Need Medicine or Eyes Wide, Tongue Tied, but rather because we still remember their 2006 sing-along debut, that musical icon of noughties lad and ladette culture, Costello Music.
The age of tonight's audience shows that we all have different memories of where we were at when Costello Music was released. Some would have still been at primary school, others studying for exams or starting out on first jobs. At the other extreme, a few might have just finished paying off the mortgage. Me? I was actually here at the UEA, with my then teenage son, when The Fratellis were debuting here, supported by The Horrors, The Maccabees and The Dykeenies (anyone remember them?) as part of the NME Rock and Roll Riot Tour. Yes, the Chelsea Dagger and I go way back.
All three original band members are here, accompanied by a keyboards player, and before they have even set foot on the stage the crowd are jumping and cavorting to the introductory strains of Offenbach's Infernal Gallop, from Orpheus in the Underworld. Perhaps better known as The Can-Can.
The tone is set, and from the opening bars of side one, track one's Henrietta, this crowd has decided that it is here to have fun. There are football-terrace style surges, there are arms aloft, there is a massed sing-along. It is like we have all been transported back to 2006. So far, so good.
The climax was always destined to come with track five, the aforementioned Chelsea Dagger, and predictably enough the whole room erupts into an orgy of unconstrained pleasure – a simultaneous release of endorphins, rush of serotonin, and pheremonic perspirations.
But then, this is where the journey of album performances can run into trouble. We have dumped our load early, yet still have another eight tracks to go. Baby Fratelli revives the pace towards the end, and both band and audience fight valiantly to keep the flames alight. John Fratelli is giving it his all, heroically slicing his finger open and splattering blood, Jackson Pollock style, across the white pickboard of his guitar in the process. Both he and we are now probably ready to close it down and show our mutual appreciation and love.
The final track is a bonus, the title track from 2013's We Need Medicine, and a deserved encore produces another couple of newer tracks before we end with a stirring punk-inspired cover of Dion's Runaround Sue. The evening has done exactly what it said on the tin, and it has been fun. Not every album will suit this kind of show. It needs a clever balance of pace in the original running order, at least a couple of real classic songs, and a great climax. In the case of Costello Music, it is arguably all but over by the end of side one.
A quick mention for the support act, former front man from Tribes, Johnny Lloyd. Back here after supporting GooGoo Dolls a few months back, he looks much more relaxed this time around, and together with his three-piece band he really gets it together with his Springsteen-esque vocals and songs. Check out his Dreamland EP, especially the Jamie-T produced track Hello Death.I think you might like it.